Online Absenteeism and Strategies for Optimising Students’ Participation During COVID-19-Induced Online Learning

Since the last quarter of 2019, the COVID-19 outbreak has spread rapidly around the world which prompted the World Health Organization to declare it a public health emergency and, then, a global pandemic. To reduce the impact of the pandemic, many countries, including Zimbabwe, adopted strategies based on social distancing rules and stay-at-home lockdowns. These strategies had severe disruptive consequences on many sectors, including all levels of education. In the case of the education sector, traditional face-to-face teaching was replaced with online teaching and learning. Although online learning was a necessary intervention which ensured that students continued with learning, it poses some ethical challenges related to genuine participation with regard to both class participation and the completion of assigned exercises, quizzes and tests among other methods of assessment. Put differently, when students are part of online classes, it becomes difficult to tell whether they are in class or not. When using Zoom or Google Meet for instance, students may not have an obligation to unmute their audio and video tools during classes. Second, when assignments and tests are administered and completed online, it is difficult to tell whether students have honestly completed the assigned work on their own or whether third parties were involved.